Steering Group Biographies
Brief biographies of the IDR Project Steering Group
Professor Tim Birtwistle, Leeds Metropolitan University, Chairman
Tim holds a personal chair (Law and Policy of Higher Education) and a Jean Monnet Chair at Leeds Law School (Leeds Metropolitan University). He is a Professor of Law in the Land of Bremen and a Visiting Professor at the Normandie Business School and the Flemish Business School VLEKHO (Brussels) where he lectures in EC Business Law. In September 2006 Tim became Head of Leeds Law School.
Tim’s main research interests have focused on Higher Education Law and Policy with a wide range of publications and papers in the area, inter alia student appeals, dispute resolution, distance learning, university liability, the meaning of “university”, mobility, credit transfer, academic freedom, widening participation, trade law and higher education. He was invited to participate in the Anglo-US Higher Education Lawyers’ Round Table at New College Oxford in June 2004 and this has been followed by continued research links with an Anglo-US comparative basis. He has also published on general commercial and EU law topics. He is on the Oxcheps (Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies) mediation panel.
Tim is an active member of the European Association for International Education (EAIE) and was President in 2001/2002 – the first, and so far only, representative of a British university. He is one of the U.K. European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System and Diploma Supplement (ECTS/DS) Counsellors and a U.K. “Bologna Promoter”.
Professor G.R. Evans, Oxcheps Higher Education Mediation Service, Project Leader
Professor Emeritus of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge and non-practising barrister.
Gill has many years of experience of staff and student disputes in universities throughout the UK as former Public Policy Secretary of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards. These include many arising out of the conduct of internal complaint, grievance and disciplinary procedures and a number of cases involving Visitors, as well as cases which have gone to the employment tribunals or to court, or been settled. They have most often been resolved successfully and speedily when some form of alternative dispute resolution has been used.
She is familiar with a range of constitutional and public-policy matters in UK higher education and have had a fairly high public profile as a commentator in these areas.
Dr Eileen Fry
Dr Eileen Fry is a mediation panel member of both the ADR Group and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Qualifying as a solicitor in 1992 she practised in the area of clinical negligence. After 12 years lecturing and designing courses at the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice she became Head of the Legal Practice Course at Kaplan Law School in 2007. She is also Law Society External Examiner on the Legal Practice Course at Cardiff University and Law Society Chief External Examiner for ethics and skills as well as working as a mediator.
Jane O'Hare, Project Administrator
Jane practised as a barrister in the areas of employment, family and personal injury litigation for some twelve years between 1978 and 1990 and thereafter taught law at undergraduate and postgraduate level before becoming Course Director for Law at Wolsey Hall in Oxford in 1992. In 1998 she became Director of Studies for an organisation offering law training in both online and face to face format and had specific responsibility for the content and delivery of their GDL, LLB and LLM programmes. Between 1992 and 2006 she worked closely with staff and students involved in undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes and gained an appreciation of the issues which can arise concerning fairness and an understanding of administrative procedures. She now works with a firm of solicitors in Oxford.
Professor John Peysner, Lincoln University
John Peysner is a Solicitor and Professor of Law at Lincoln Law School, University of University. He has edited "The Litigator" and was founding Course Leader of the LLM in Advanced Litigation at Nottingham Law School. He had seventeen years experience in litigation practice, including Law Centres, Legal Aid and latterly, defendant Medical Negligence. He writes and teaches on the financing of dispute resolution, dispute resolution of systems, civil justice changes, legal aid, litigation skills and funding, risk management and assessment, competition and World Trade Organisation law. He has conducted research on case management, costs, civil procedural systems, legal aid, judicial education, consumer attitudes to solicitor’s services and testing in house against contracted legal services. He was a member of the Lord Chancellor’s Committee on Claims Assessors (The Blackwell Committee) and wrote the first draft of the report. He was a member of the Civil Justice Council (2001 to 2006) and chair of the Costs Committee. He is consultant editor of the Law Society’s ‘Civil Litigation Handbook’. He is a member of the Civil Committee of the Judicial Studies Board.
Jill Scott, Staffordshire University, Equality and Diversity Officer
Jill was recently on secondment to the Equality Challenge Unit in London running a national project called Dignity at Work, which was concerned promoting good practice in dealing with bullying and harassment in the HE sector. Jill has worked in a variety of departments during her 17 years at Staffordshire University and has worked alongside Clare Ridgley in the Equality and Diversity team for the last 5 years.
Joan Whieldon, Wolverhampton University
Joan is currently the Head of Quality Innovation and Training and a Principal Lecturer in Law and member of the management team within the School of Legal Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. She is a former director of a project management and consultancy company specialising in designing dispute resolution systems and a partner in a legal training firm accredited by The Law Society. She has also been a Litigation Manager with a law firm in Cheshire. Joan has worked at all levels in industry advising on contracts and providing training to a variety of organisations, blue chip companies and law firms. She is a mediator and also a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and has been a university Grievance Advisor. She has also been an academic advisor and auditor for quality in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of study. Joan is also a former Director of a University and has been a member of the Academic Board of the University of Wolverhampton. She has trained in mediation and dispute systems design both in the UK and USA. and has been a key note speaker at several international conferences dealing with using both mediation and dispute resolution systems to reduce claims and resolve employment disputes effectively. Joan was a founder member of the International Harassment Network.
Professor Douglas H. Yarn Georgia State University, USA
Professor of Law and Director, Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
Doug Yarn serves as Executive Director of the Inter-University Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law, where he has been teaching alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and professional responsibility since 1994. He has degrees from Duke University, the University of Georgia, and Cambridge University, England.
An experienced mediator, arbitrator, and litigator, Yarn has been an ADR Fellow of the American Arbitration Association (AAA), director of the AAA's Center for International Commercial Disputes, and a Salzburg Fellow in international environmental negotiation. From 1989-94, he served as in-house attorney, mediator, and panelist trainer for the AAA and has trained mediators and arbitrators nationwide. He has facilitated in numerous domestic public policy disputes involving issues such as access to health care, land use, and the environment. He has designed conflict management systems for private and public entities, domestic and international, and has served as a mediator and consultant for the United Nations and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. He was a member of the Georgia Supreme Court’s Commission on Dispute Resolution and currently oversees the University System of Georgia Board of Regents’ Conflict Resolution Initiative. In connection with the later, he has consulted for numerous institutions of higher education in the U.S. and many other countries.
Yarn drafted the current Georgia Arbitration Code and is the author of Alternative Dispute Resolution: Practice and Procedure in Georgia (3nd ed. West 2006), Alternative Dispute Resolution: Practice and Procedure in North Carolina (Harrison 1998), The Dictionary of Conflict Resolution (Jossey-Bass, 1999), and numerous book chapters and articles. He is a Gruter Institute Research Fellow whose research interests include international commercial arbitration, international environmental dispute resolution, institutionalization, ADR ethics, dueling codes, apology and forgiveness, biological foundations of conflict resolution, and conciliatory behavior in non-human primates.
Frances Burton
Frances Burton is a Barrister-Academic and Mediator with Chambers in Lincolns Inn and a long career as a lecturer and tutor on both academic and vocational law courses, which has included London Guildhall University, the College of Law and BPP Law school (of which she was one of two initial members of staff on its foundation in 1992, being that Law School's first Bar Course Director) and the online Law School SPR.
For the past 5 years a Principal Lecturer at the University of the West of England at Bristol, Director of the Bar Vocational by Open Learning at UWE's Bristol Institute of Legal Practice, and a founding member and Director of ADR Chambers UK, which she represents on the Civil Mediation Council, she was recruited in 2002 by UWE to design, obtain validation for and see the BVCOL into established operation, and has been particularly pleased that the Leader of the Western Circuit, Philip Mott QC, has noted that this innovative course has placed the Circuit, whose practitioners contribute to both the full time and part time modes of the BVC at Bristol, into the vanguard of access to the Bar, offering as it does a 2 year online and part time weekend study mode of the BVC which enables students to fund their BVC studies for Call to the Bar through full time employment.
The Bristol BVC was also the first BVC Provider to offer a mediation Option to BVC students, and to introduce mediation into the Civil Litigation syllabus which at Bristol was early redesignated "Civil Dispute Resolution". Frances also sits as a Lawyer Chairman of the Residential Property Tribunal Service in London, where she was a founding member of the Tribunal's Mediation Service, which is supported by BPP Law School's Mediation Friends.
When not either teaching or designing courses (most recently for the UWE-Central Law Training Paralegal Family Law course with a partner author from Nottingham Law School) she writes and edits articles and textbooks, (most recently Core Statutes in Family Law, now in its 3rd edition with Palgrave Macmillan), edits the annual Newsletter of the International Bar Association's Academic and Professional Development Committee (of which she is also a Vice-Chairman), is Convenor of the Society of Legal Scholars' specialist subject section Practice, Profession and Ethics and a Vice-President of the Association of Women Barristers and chairs the Civil Mediation Council's Academic Sub-Committee which steers the CMC Academic Group, currently led by Professor Simon Roberts of LSE, which plans a Colloquium in the autumn of 2007 to introduce a series of Mediation seminars in 2008.
NUS
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National Postgraduate Committee
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David Bleiman, UCU representative
A full time union official with the University and College Union (and one of its predecessor unions, AUT) since 1982, David is involved in mediation through supporting UCU members in resolving serious disputes with their University employers in Scotland, Durham and Newcastle. His industrial relations experience includes traditional negotiation, partnership projects, conduct and resolution of disputes. A Chartered Fellow of CIPD, he is a member of the local mediation interest group. He is a lay member of the Employment Appeal Tribunal. A member of the STUC General Council, when President he signed the Partnership Agreement between the STUC and the Scottish Executive. Qualifications: MA, MBA, FCIPD.
Steve Denton, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Registrar and Secretary Leeds Metropolitan University
Steve was born in Oldham in 1965. He graduated in Law from Lancaster University in 1986; following which he spent a further year as a sabbatical officer on the Students' Union.
He began his career in 1987 with Hounslow Borough Council in West London, starting as a management trainee; and progressed and developed through a variety of central administrative and policy support roles. He followed this with a brief spell at Surrey County Council.
In 1997, he became University Secretary and Clerk to the Board at Thames Valley University, based in Ealing, West London and Slough, Berkshire. In addition to responsibility for governance and legal matters, he also had responsibility during his time there for property and estates, human resources, and local community relations. His time at Thames Valley University coincided with a difficult time for the University, and Steve was centrally involved in crisis management and the subsequent development and implementation of the University’s recovery plan.
In May 2001, needing a change professionally and personally, Steve relocated to Yorkshire, becoming University Secretary and Clerk to the Board at Leeds Metropolitan University, covering a similar range of duties and responsibilities as at Thames Valley University.
In February 2004, Steve became Registrar and Secretary of the University, bringing together a range of University wide student administrative and support services, including governance and legal matters, the academic registry, planning, student services, communication and marketing and widening access and participation. He was made a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in November 2005.
Steve is also Chair of UNIPOL Student Homes, and a member of the national executives of both the AUA and AHUA.
Chris Hall
Joint Working Project Officer
UCEA
UPA representative
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Tracy Allan, HEFCE observer
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